Tindra quoted The bomb and the computer. by Wilson, Andrew
"Data," he said, "are not just facts. They are facts that have been converted into a form suitable for scientific purposes, which means they have to go through a kind of screen."
— The bomb and the computer. by Wilson, Andrew (Page 197)
“He” being David Singer.
This reveals a couple of issues with trying to quantify all the things. First being that trying to turn documents into math is… weird. And that what you collect is not ground truth - it has been filtered, screened. Even personal diaries do not contain the whole truth.
And goes on to explain that the data collected from simulations, from war games, are not actually all that great because there’s lots of manipulation that happens to control the game environment.